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A Classic Clock Problem in Math for Your Entertainment
At what time will the two clock hands overlap?
I will never forget my 5th and 6th-grade Math teacher. He was stout, stern, and strict in discipline. Being one of the few male teachers in school, students with discipline issues often ended up seeing him. Even though corporal punishment had been outlawed, he always carried with him a thick wooden ruler, and all students knew that ruler was not just for drawing straight lines on the blackboard. Because of his high standard of ‘law and order’, many students were scared of him.
But that is not all I remember about him. Seemingly cold and unfriendly, he was actually a very passionate math teacher and had impacted me a lot.
As I grew up, all my other Math teachers focused on teaching me how to ‘do Math’, on the contrary, my 5th and 6th-grade Math teacher had shown me how to think. To him, Math is all about thinking hard and deep, not remembering formulae and proofs. He always made Math fun and challenging to learn; many of the math problems that he went over in class could not be found in a standard Math curriculum. Every Friday, he gave students tricky problems to work on over the weekend and I always looked forward to Monday to see which classmates managed to find a solution. He had seeded a genuine love of math inside of me and I am forever grateful to…
